Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Low comedy

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in May 2003)

I like the idea of
taking the elements of low comedy – toilet humour, doubles entendres, and so
forth – and raising them to the level of art. In recent years, the Farrelly
brothers attracted a fair bit of critical approval, particularly for There’s Something About Mary (I didn’t
get it). And some serious critics held American
Pie in very high regard (I can just about see that). But if you really want
to talk about this, I’d start with Blake Edwards. At one time, I thought
Edwards was one of the best American directors of his time. Nowadays, I’d say
he’s better than most people realize, but that isn’t quite the same thing. Most
people acknowledge the gentle charm of Breakfast
at Tiffany’s or the surprising rawness of Days of Wine and Roses. And the Pink
Panther movies were big business in their day, although I’m not sure they
got enough attention for their formal rigour – a quality which admittedly fell
off sharply later in the series.

Blake Edwards

Remember how, after
Peter Sellers died, Edwards put together a whole film (Trail of the Pink Panther) out of discarded material and new
linking bits, after which he made Curse
of… with a new lead character, and later again Son of… with Roberto Benigni. Some see this as merely desperate,
but it seems to me to go beyond that, into what might be regarded as a
pseudo-scientific examination of
desperation, of the repetition and patterning that’s always marked his comedy.
But I acknowledge that I could be giving him too much credit here – after all,
at the same (declining) stage in his career, he recycled Victor/Victoria into a not-particularly-successful Broadway
musical.

His two masterpieces
(OK, that’s a relative term too) are 10
and S.O.B., two brittle and often
bitter examinations of aging in Hollywood. In Bo Derek, 10 had Edwards’ best ever gimmick, and Dudley Moore temporarily
caught the popular imagination, but the movie is consistently rueful, if not
depressing, and it captures a certain type of self-indulgent maleness very
well. S.O.B. was ever darker –
notionally a wacky farce, populated almost entirely by old, unhappy people.
Julie Andrews baring her breasts provided another (although not quite as
compelling) audience-grabber, but the heart of the film was William Holden as a
director who’d sold his soul almost completely, and yet managed to retain a
notion of gritty integrity that somehow hung intact through the movie. It’s yet
another wonderful Edwards ambiguity – almost the ultimate biting of the hand
that fed him.

Peter Segal,
director of the new comedy Anger
Management, is no Blake Edwards. Specifically, his film has no visual style
at all, and no attitude. And very few good lines. I think I only laughed at
some silly euphemisms for sexual activity, but that just tells you something
about me. This is a typically ill-considered, barely controlled Hollywood
package, seemingly built around a single concept: that Adam Sandler and Jack
Nicholson would be in the same movie. Which is not a bad concept, but it
doesn’t take you very far either.

Anger Management

The surprise is that
much of the movie’s interest would come not from Nicholson, but from Sandler.
But to address Nicholson first – the movie is obviously a conscious relaxation
for him, after The Pledge and About Schmidt. Critics praised him
(excessively, in my view) for how he kept his usual mannerisms under wraps in Schmidt, but here he lets them all
tumble out. You name your favourite Nicholson moment – it’s evoked here at some
point. Somehow it all manages to seem more weighty and respectable than Robert
de Niro’s recent exercises in self-parody, but that’s yet another relative
assessment. Presumably the whole thing carries the significance for Nicholson
of a trip to the Oscars; sprawled out in his front row seat, mugging for the
camera and getting treated like a king.

It’s hard to think
of an actor being handed a greater gift than Sandler was with Paul Thomas
Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love. The
movie had almost no purpose other than to rehabilitate Sandler; to show how his
shtick masked his warmth and complexity. The whole movie, more or less, served
as a visualization of Sandler’s passive-aggressive confusion. At the time, I
didn’t really know what to make of it – it was obviously accomplished, but on
some level seemed just nutty.

But now, Anger Management finally proves the
success of Anderson’s film, because Sandler just doesn’t seem the same to me
anymore. He plays a nervous executive assistant, put-upon and under-rewarded at
work, stifled in his relationship with girlfriend Marisa Tomei by various
hang-ups. A stupid misunderstanding with a flight attendant gets him sentenced
to anger management therapy. Nicholson plays the doctor who, of course, is
crazier than the patient. He leads Sandler through various supposedly
therapeutic misadventures, winding up with a splashy finale in Yankee Stadium
(with guest star Rudolph Giuliani).

Saved by Sandler

The joke is that
Sandler doesn’t need anger management, but he sure needs something. Nicholson’s
misaligned treatments, stamping all over every aspect of Sandler’s life, only
makes him angrier, thus prolonging the sentence and digging him a deeper hole.
It’s a conventional tale of escalating disaster, but Sandler never seemed to me
like merely the suffering fool. He avoids the over the top outbursts of his
pre-Punch Drunk persona, all but
embodying the straight man to Nicholson’s antics. The much remarked upon
“sweetness” of Anderson’s film is back too. But most interesting is the
ambiguity he projects regarding his true mental state – a quality that
frequently suggests there’s more to the movie than meets the eye.

As it turns out,
there sort of is – an ending that attempts to put another twist on everything
we’ve seen. It’s utterly feeble – the ultimate proof of the film’s vacuousness.
The only other thing of interest is the movie’s faint attempt to tap into
contemporary paranoia – it has a few references to these being “difficult
times,” and the Yankee Stadium climax, with that guest star, certainly comes
across as an exercise in reassurance. The movie could easily have extended this
line of inquiry, setting up Sandler as a funnel for contemporary jitteriness,
but that’s more than it has in mind.

In fact, the film’s
ultimately the most complacent kind of backslap to the audience – the kind of
movie that assumes that if the cast is having fun, then so will we. Another
assumption it makes: there can’t be any better entertainment than watching
celebrities goofing around, so just about every supporting role is filled by a
“name” – Heather Graham, Woody Harrelson, John Turturro. It’s like watching a
particularly demeaning episode of Celebrity
Fear Factor.

Still, it’s the kind
of movie that at least has interesting flaws, and then there’s Sandler. It’s
maybe a quarter of the way to being an intelligent dumb comedy.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).